Japan texts note army's role in suicides

December 27, 2007|By Norimitsu Onishi, New York Times News Service

TOKYO — Japan's Education Ministry announced Wednesday that it would partly reinstate references in textbooks to the military's role in forcing civilians to commit mass suicide during the Battle of Okinawa in the final months of World War II.

Faced with protests from Okinawa, the ministry said that high school textbooks to be used in the next academic year would acknowledge the military's "involvement" in the mass suicides. But the ministry stopped short of putting back original references to the military's "coercing" or "forcing" Okinawans into committing mass suicides, saying that no supporting documents had been found.

In April, under the administration of Shinzo Abe, the nationalist former prime minister, education officials said textbooks would be cleansed of longtime references to the military. The decision caused an uproar among Okinawans who, during World War II, were brainwashed by Japanese soldiers into believing that they would be slaughtered by invading Americans and that mass suicides were preferable. Thousands are believed to have committed suicide in villages occupied by Japanese soldiers; mass suicides did not take place where there were no soldiers.

In October, after a massive protest in Okinawa and Abe was succeeded by the centrist Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, education officials said they would reconsider further changes to the references -- contradicting their long-standing assertion that the country's history textbooks were not influenced by politics.

The contents of Japan's history textbooks have long been a source of tension with China and South Korea, which have accused Tokyo of trying to whitewash its militarist past. But the ministry's plan to revise explanations about the Battle of Okinawa marked the first time that textbooks had become a political problem domestically.

Last month, textbook publishers submitted passages reinserting references to the military "coercing" or "forcing" Okinawans into mass suicide. But the ministry rejected this clear description of the military's role, effectively opting for the softer and vaguer reference to the military's "involvement."

In searching for a middle ground, the ministry left both sides unsatisfied.

"I can't give it full marks but I see that the ministry did extend acceptable consideration to this issue," the governor of Okinawa, Hirokazu Nakaima, said in a news conference Wednesday, according to Kyodo News.

The Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, a group of nationalist scholars that, along with politicians like Abe, led a campaign to rid textbooks of references to wartime crimes committed by the Japanese military, condemned the ministry's decision. On its Web site, the group said that the ministry "had succumbed to political pressure and approved one-sided historical descriptions."